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Who is to Blame or Get Credit - Your Management or Your Organization's Culture?
Do you wish your organization
were performing better? Of course, the answer is yes. And a "yes"
answer will be more emphatic from those of you whose organizations are
struggling. We all worry about our livelihood. Similar to the "nature
versus nurture" question about whether one's genes or environment
contributes more to an individual's personality and character, I pose
this question: What influences an organization's future performance
more - the competence of its current executive management team or the
momentum or excess baggage of its culture?
Wouldn't We All Love a Crystal Ball that Works?
Some of you have been either lucky or astute enough to choose to
work in an industry or public sector agency that has and may still have
enjoyed substantial upside growth. I had little appreciation for this
until I read the book Strategy and the Business Landscape by
the Harvard Business School Professor Pankaj Ghemawat. Ghemawat's book
ranked the highest to lowest industry sectors on a return on equity
(ROE) basis for the years 1978 to 1998. It made so much sense. The
highest were cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and tobacco and the lowest were
steel, air transportation, and paper and forest.
If you knew these differences in advance when you were young and
just entering the labor market, you could have pursued the winners and
had a nice tailwind at your back - plus a more secure personal
financial future and possibly higher job satisfaction, too. It's more
likely to be fun to work at a place that is growing than shrinking.
Think of the exhilarating experience of the young workforce today -
even this afternoon - at Yahoo! or Google.
Then there is the reality of our current personal career situations.
Some of us work for an organization with sustained high growth, but we
work in a division or department for managers who are losers or a pain.
The flip side is some of us are employed in an organization, such as a
newspaper that is adversely threatened by technology (e.g., the
Internet), but every day is an exciting thrill compared to the rote
jobs of some of our friends.
Why can't we all have fun? Organizational success is not a zero-sum
game where the winner's gains are offset by the loser's. Although Adam
Smith's historic breakthrough 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations,
was 903-pages long, its fame came from a simple message - we can all
have a more prosperous life together (if countries specialize in what
they are best at). Why can't Adam Smith's principles apply at the
organizational level? Why today are so many of the companies
highlighted in Tom Peters' and Robert H. Waterman's best-selling book
of 1982, In Search of Excellence, bankrupt or no longer in
existence (e.g., Kmart, Wang Labs, Delta Airlines, Amdahl and Digital
Equipment)? The big question I am asking is: How much is an
organization's future performance going to be determined by its
leadership team or by its culture?
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